Delaware's dog-barking law rarely enforced

Questions remain after council defeated ordinance

Feb. 3, 2014

Joan Deaver

Written by

James Fisher

The News Journal

Sussex County Council had spent months thinking about ways to penalize owners whose dogs won’t stop barking, without reaching consensus, when county lawyers made a find: A state law already prohibited dog-barking that went on for 10 minutes straight.

For council members Sam Wilson and Vance Phillips that was reason enough to vote no on the Sussex-specific barking dog ordinance their colleague, Joan Deaver, had been pushing for months. Deaver’s bill would have had the county allocate $35,000 a year in its animal control contract for answering noise complaints.

That was too expensive a proposition for a majority of the council to support. “I would ask the state police and DNREC [the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control] to step up and do their job. Respectfully,” Phillips said as he cast his no vote on Jan. 21. Michael Vincent, the council president, voted last, and his no vote cinched Deaver’s defeat.

“There’s already a law on the books,” Vincent said. “Why would we want to pass another law?”

While the state law singling out barking dogs does exist, it is rarely enforced. Not a single citation under the state law was issued by Delaware State Police in Sussex County in 2013, said Cpl. Gary Fournier, department spokesman. He said troopers responded to 13 calls in the past year about loud dogs in Sussex County.

The residents who came to plead for a Sussex County barking dog ordinance in 2013 noted the state’s other two counties have their own laws about it,

John Ciarlo, a Rehoboth Beach-area resident, told the council in September he fruitlessly asked his state representative and animal control workers for help. Each time, he said, he was told no action could be taken because the county lacked an ordinance.

“The last thing you want to hear all day is ‘ruff, ruff, ruff,’” Ciarlo said then.

The Sussex Council, after defeating Deaver’s bill, asked county staff to add a notice to the county website directing noise complaints about dogs to law enforcement agencies. The county constable’s site now informs residents that “complaints about noise/barking dogs are governed by the Delaware Noise Control Act... and should be directed to the appropriate local or state law enforcement agency.”

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Gary Long, of Milford, took note of that guidance, when he heard dogs making a racket late last month he started making calls. He called animal control, and was told nothing could be done about noise alone; he’d have to offer some proof of animal abuse to get a response. Then he called Sussex County code enforcement, in case county government could help.

“They said there was nothing they could do, because they had no noise ordinance,” Long said.

Next he called DNREC, the department that had crafted the noise ordinance in state code. “They said: ‘Not us,’” Long said in an interview last week. The department was aware of Sussex’s call to enforce the noise law, Long said, but didn’t offer to respond to his call.

Finally, Long called the state police. “They could go over and talk to the guy,” Long says he was told. “But they wouldn’t write any citations for it.... Nobody’s told them to enforce it yet, I guess.”

David Small, deputy secretary of DNREC, said the ordinance dates to the early 1980s and was intended to curb noise pollution from industrial sites. If dispatchers at DNREC’s complaint line receive a call about a barking dog, Small said, they are much more likely to bounce the call to another agency, like state police, than to send one of the department’s eight emergency responders to the scene.

“The dispatch center’s probably going to be looking at a referral to another responder. That’s the current practice,” Small said in an interview Saturday. If more and more people follow Sussex County Council’s guidance and report barking problems to DNREC, he said, “I think we’re going to have some conversations with other first responders. We don’t have folks who are out on the road 24-7, and to be able to effectively enforce this you’d need to move out pretty quickly.”

Deaver said she wishes the county had passed its own ordinance and charged its animal control officers with enforcement, instead of relying on a state code that seems lightly enforced when it comes to dogs.

“We have crime issues that are very big. Dog issues come second,” Deaver said. “It’s overkill to have the state involved.”